CHAPTER NINE -- MID-CENTURY MODERNISMO; or, HOW TO SUCCEED IN PUBLISHING WITHOUT REALLY DECORATING
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
How glamorous was my glamour job? Arrival at work each morning lacked the allure that fans attribute to stars at the gates of Paramount in the studio era, or deposited at MGM in a long, sleek limousine. Closer to home, the image of high-gloss editors dashing into midtown offices at Condé Nast or Random House thrills aspiring wordsmiths. Remember Meryl Streep's haute-couture-and-fresh-flowers office in The Devil Wears Prada?
Reality is more stark. We punched a time clock upon arrival, and again when we left. Some resented this proletarian requirement, but to me it recalled a scene from a Joan Blondell movie. I also liked knowing that George was aware of my many overtime hours. This paid off at Christmas, when our own Ebenezer Scrooge loosened his purse strings and provided roast goose and plum pudding; or, times having changed, a check in the amount of five hundred dollars. I hurried to the bank for fear he might change his mind. If George had remembered his Dickens, he would surely have caroled, "God bless us everyone," and meant every word...for the rest of that short December afternoon.
Nor were Modernismo offices any more down-at-heels than those of more mainstream publishers. Although we referred to the eleventh floor as "George's Museum of Second-Hand Office Furniture," his Ikea and Salvation Army décor outclassed many presumed betters. A few years later, when I was free lancing, my editor at Publishers Weekly sent me to interview an FSG author, meaning Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the prestigious publisher of Nobel laureates, Pulitzer winners, and big-name bestselling authors. Located on Union Square West, the company might have scrounged its chattels from the city dump. One risked back injury by sitting in the tumble-down chairs and pre-war sofas in the reception area. Editorial offices might have been furnished from Aunt Bertha's yard sale in Hackensack. The official explanation put out by these respectable houses was that no frills meant larger royalty checks for authors. (FSG has since moved to a high rise far downtown in the financial district.)
What's behind the curtain, figuratively and in reality, differs from the glossy product that's being pushed. Eva Gabor said, "On Broadway you see those glittering fronts of theatres, then you go backstage and find the most awful holes and steps which are dangerous at best."
I visited Pauline Kael several times in her cubbyhole at The New Yorker, on each occasion wondering whether anything had changed since the magazine's first issue in 1925. Glancing into offices on my way down the dim corrider to Pauline’s few square feet, I saw ancient typewriters, books and papers spilling over desks, worn carpets, Venetian blinds with missing slats. This self-consciously sophisticated magazine was put together on what might have been the set of a silent movie whose producer ran short of funds. Somewhere in the disparity lurked a New Yorker cartoon. (The magazine eventually moved to fancier digs.)
Later still, when St. Martin's published several of my books, I wondered whether the pokey elevator would make it to my editor's office on the eighteenth floor of the Flatiron Building. Once there, I found that chaos reigned, though my editor's airy charm belied the disorder. Again I thought of Dickens, this time of Bleak House and the hundred years of documents in the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Had my editor not been tall and willowy, I might have overlooked her behind the tottering stacks of manuscripts on her desk. Was it the slush pile, or The Day After Tomorrow? High-rise heaps of books, more papers, file folders, pre-pub galleys, correspondence, and miscellany of all descriptions overran her desk and fell to the floor, making it necessary to choreograph one's steps in order to reach her and shake hands without a fracture. St. Martin's, like the others, has since decamped to a less quaint location.
And my own present-day office, on the second floor of my home, could pass for an annex of George's museum, with books-and-paper buildup à la St. Martin's, a battered file cabinet, and an overloaded credenza. You might call it a shambles, but I could navigate it blindfolded. I have concluded that shabby disarray encourages the craft of writing and leads to better-phrased output.
Dark hallways in that Modernismo museum ran in confusing directions, and many walls ended several feet below the ceiling. This meant that private conversations were easily overheard, a hazard when knives were out and intrigues taking shape. My own office had conventional walls and a door. When that door was closed, the room was reputed to be abuzz with secrets.
Every surface in those long corridors was painted in unrelenting battleship gray. Why not a happier shade, I mused, such as Navajo White, a Sherwin-Williams color, or Sea Salt, the latter a restful misty hue like fog on a harbor. Our office walls were spared the gray in favor of general eggshell. On Mondays, after weekend closure, a lingering smell of cooked cabbage permeated the entire eleventh floor, though presumably no one ever prepared such a dish on the premises.
George insisted that his own space be called the front office. Perhaps he had Hollywood moguls like Darryl Zanuck and L.B. Mayer in mind. The anteroom to George's spacious office was occupied by his secretary, a wrenlike woman from Brooklyn called Mrs. Sheldon. Proper, demure, discreet, she struck me as comically out of place in a company whose raison d'être was erotic stimulation in every form. Once, to my surprise, she accompanied George on an important business trip to Brazil. Clif and I, en route to George's office shortly after they returned, teased her with questions about the sensuous tropics. "You can tell us -- was it all business, or a little monkey business after hours?"
"C'mon, boys," she said in her Judy Holliday accent. "You know a good secretary is harder to find than some busty broad who can't spell." An innocent smile: "And George can tell the difference. I know shorthand, too." Indeed, in her youth she had learned that speedy writing system which now seems destined for extinction, like runes and hieroglyphics.
Middle-aged and happily married, she was far from George's type. He valued her because she seemed always to rise a few feet above the chaos taking place around her. Besides, his predilection was for Asian women, for business and monkey business. As Mae West might have said, he was an Occidental mister in an Oriental mood for love. For a time, George kept a Korean girlfriend in his midtown condo...until his German wife, who ruled the family home in Sparta, New Jersey, got wind of the concubine. Each time the mistress visited Modernismo, I sensed that she was casing the joint to calculate the price of everything in view. As she breezed out the door, I wondered whether she had even put a price tag on me.
At times, our eleventh floor resembled a sweat shop in Kowloon, and I'm sure George underpaid the hardworking young women employed there. They were never girlfriend material. More likely, they were undocumented immigrants whose green-card status remained murky. Their English was usually so basic that it was hard to make them understand a simple request for typing paper, whiteout, file folders. Virginia Chua, an ethnic Chinese from the Phillippines, posted this sign on the supply room, of which she was the chatelaine: "After 4 pm not entertain." Given her chubby dowdiness and rude manners, this was surely not a carnal message copied from Shanghai Lily. We took it to mean that supplies were not forthcoming past tea time.
Then there was Sally Lo, a.k.a. Yung Sung. Said to be from the People's Republic of China, she spoke virtually no English and I never knew exactly what her job was. Once, on some vague mission, she ventured into the art department for the first time. There she was confronted by several hundred representations of naked men: full frontals, plus close-ups of alluring parts. Sitting at my desk down the hall, with my door open, I heard screams. Was she being dismembered? I looked up to see Miss Lo running as though pursued by foreign devils. Going in to investigate, I found Clif and Tony doubled with laughter, for poor Miss Lo had glimpsed the depths of Yankee imperialistic depravity. I half-expected her to return to the Middle Flowery Kingdom, i.e., Maoist China, and take up a rifle with the Red Detachment of Women.
Miss Lo's reaction was the most extreme, but the art department did have a way of halting people in their tracks, even those who thought they had seen it all. Our magazines tested the broadmindedness of the most liberal. In puritan America, male nudity still makes people squirm and change the subject. And a hard dick in broad daylight requires smelling salts for the faint-hearted.
Had Miss Lo lingered she might have perused, on every wall, shelf, and table, awaiting placement in coming issues, bold color separations (enlarged from color slides) showing the most stunning naked men: some muscular, others slender, handsome or beautiful or bruttito, sexy-ugly; blondes, Latins, blacks, some guys on their knees while others soared among the beams and ballast of construction sites, and still others draped over sofas, or posed on motorcycles, picking a flower, petting a dog, chained to a wall or catching a ball -- the catalogue stretches on, like the clever list in a Cole Porter song. The one thing these models had in common: they were male, and it showed.
For those of us who beheld this wall-to-wall skin every day it became humdrum, no more stimulating than linoleum or fabric samples.
Those Asian women like Miss Lo were unfailingly loyal to George. Only one broke ranks; that was Frances, who had anglicized her name. She too was ethnic Chinese from the Phillippines, she was good natured, congenial, and she did me a great favor. In summer, gay staff members and a few others would work longer hours Monday through Thursday in order to depart at noon on Friday for the fleshpots of Fire Island or other seductive haunts. That meant that our section of the eleventh floor, the so-called gay side on the west facing afternoon sun, was empty except for Frances and me. I refused to wake up early four days a week, since I had no interest in weekends on Fire Island. I happened to like New York.
George, obsessed with saving electricity though not for reasons of ecology, turned off the air conditioning at noon on those Fridays, locked the door to the a.c. system, and entrusted the key to Frances. Who, with a kind heart, entrusted it to me.
I loved Friday afternoons in summer because they were devoid of interruptions. Not even phone calls, for Renay, our diminutive receptionist who answered scores of calls each day, took off with the others. Only once did George return unexpectedly to find cool air blowing. Pretending I hadn't noticed, I convinced him that he had neglected his usual shut-off. Down went the a.c.; he left, and on again it went. Did those fashionable editors at Condé Nast and FSG fight for cool air in the dog days of August?
Adding to the nutty incongruity of the place were two small offices adjacent to mine, one the headquarters of a magazine called Crochet Fantasy, and beside it the command post of Knitting Elegance.
I had only a nodding acquaintance with the men who ran these operations, one a Dutchman, the other a middle-aged burgher with rosy cheeks and a chubby teenage son who served as his apprentice. George had a financial interest in each publication. If I hadn't seen copies of these magazines, I might well have imagined them as the front for some clandestine scheme. An enterprising screenwriter could turn them into such...as a Holly Golightly escapade, perhaps.
The most startling fact about our building at 155 Sixth Avenue is this: our landlord was Trinity Church, the historic Episcopal parish on lower Broadway facing Wall Street. According to TheRealDeal.com, "Trinity Real Estate is the real estate arm of Trinity Church. The parish owns millions of square feet of commercial space and ground leases in Manhattan because of a lucky break of history. In 1705, Queen Anne of England granted the church the 215 acres of land that became the basis for its portfolio."
Our offices at 155 Sixth Avenue, in a building constructed in 1929, were therefore an unusual conjunction of the sacred and the sexual. I occasionally wondered whether our landlord’s clergy and parishoners knew, or cared about, our enterprise. Real estate keeps many churches afloat. That's because God's business, in the United States, is tax free.